


Buried Alive

by thatawkwardfangirl



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternative Universe-Modern Setting, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-03-25
Packaged: 2018-01-17 01:13:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1368478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatawkwardfangirl/pseuds/thatawkwardfangirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Eren loses his mother in a car accident that he blames himself for, everything gets bad. Will his older boyfriend, Jean, help or will someone else's fiance, Levi, do all the work?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Buried Alive

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is my new fic. It's more sophisticated than my other, Operation Destraightify, which was more of a funny, sexual thing. This is serious-like with a slow relationship build between Levi and Eren. I promise you they will be together by the end of this fic, whenever that is. 
> 
> I'm gonna update this every Tuesday. 
> 
> Please feel free to comment or PM your thoughts! I'd love to hear it. Also, if you notice any typos, just let me know!
> 
> -Your fellow writer, fangirl, and nerd,  
> Mollie.

Have you ever felt like you're too old to be in your own body? Like you're growing up too fast? Have you ever felt like you should be hitting a certain milestone in your life already, but you're too young, even though you feel older? I've felt that. I lived that. And I still am. 

Normally, everyday I wake up, get dressed, go to high school, come home, eat, then go to sleep and repeat until the weekends, with a little visiting my boyfriend in between. But not today. Today I woke up on a Monday and put a black tuxedo and tie on. My mom died. Today’s the funeral day. 

When you’re a kid, when you still haven’t moved out of your parents’ house, it seems to you like your parents can never die, like they’ll always be there for you. So, when my mom got in a car crash last week and died of internal bleeding, I felt like the world came crashing down on me, like my childhood was over. In this past week, I’ve matured way past my age. Of course, I’d always felt older than sixteen, maybe nineteen or twenty in my mind, considering I was secretly dating Jean, a twenty-three-year-old guy that works at my favorite bookstore downtown. But having my mom actually die.. It made me feel like I had died to. A little part of me had thought my mom wouldn’t die until I got old and got married and had a life. But the universe has a funny way of giving us what we want: it doesn’t. 

As I attempt to pull my tie on, looking at myself in the mirror, which I rarely do, I see someone in the mirror. It’s myself, but it isn’t. I look worn, dead, dried out. But, most of all, I look guilty. The day my mom got in that car crash, we had gotten into a big fight over me wanting her to go pick up some fast food instead of cooking disgusting healthy food. Vegetables really do hate me. On my mom’s angry way back from picking up McDonald’s for me, some douche wasn’t looking where he was going and rammed right into the driver’s side of my mom’s car. Of course, he gets out of the hospital with barely a broken leg and minor head injury, but my mom died. And that’s someone I will never get back. 

And it’s all my fault. 

I’m forced to hold myself together as I finally get my tie on and walk down the stairs to my living room, which is crowded with relatives, some that I didn’t even know existed. I saw my adopted sister, Mikasa, in a corner, wearing one of those black, barely see-through veils that people often wear to funerals to hide the tears that were rushing down their cheeks, like Mikasa was doing right now. Of course, she was doing a very good job at hiding it. Mikasa was good at hiding things, considering she could sometimes be mysterious and was always tough. She didn’t show her feelings. But I knew my sister, even if she was adopted. 

I walked over to her, wrapping my arms securely around her, still a bit surprised when she didn’t immediately push me away. My hand reached out, finger stopping tears that were falling in their tracks.

“She wouldn’t want you to cry, Mikasa.” I told my sister, heart wrenching at seeing my sister like this. Being the children of our mother, our hearts probably hurt more than anyone else in this room. There were friends and family and ex-family and some people that just came because they heard there was a funeral. But I knew the person that had died. She had loved me, helped me, taught me. She had been my mother and now she was gone. 

Perhaps the only other person that felt worse than me and Mikasa was dad. He had been holed up in his room all week, leaving me and Mikasa to take care of ourselves. Whenever I passed by his door, I heard broken sobs. He really wasn’t taking any of this well. Not that anyone was, but he hadn’t even spoken to his own children! For a brief moment in time, with my eyes now opened to the prospect of death, I thought he might kill himself over the loss of my mother. She really was something. My mom was amazing and she truly loved my dad. But now she was gone. Did that mean my dad would be gone, too?

Mikasa and I were whispering comforting words to each other when a couple came up to us. Now, let me go ahead and tell you, I am gay. I really am. And I’m proud of it. If any woman ever says anything to me about how being gay is “wrong”, I just simply say, “What’s wrong with it? I like dick, you like dick, we’re all on the same boat here. You’re really just a hypocrite.” 

Needless to say, I have no problem in telling people what I’m thinking or how I feel about them. That’s really the only reason me and Jean are together right now. Because he admitted he had feelings for me too after I confessed how I felt. I can’t introduce him to my family, though. At least not for two more years. He’d be taken to jail because, to other people, they consider Jean a pedophile, when I really made the first move on him when I kissed him while watching a movie in his apartment. 

The reason I’m telling you this is because the couple that came up to us consisted of two people: a woman and a man. I have no regard for the woman at all, but the man beside her was gorgeous. He was short, yes, but he was beautiful. And, for a brief moment, I wanted him. Then I saw the ring on the woman’s finger and I remembered that I’m kind of already in an illegal relationship. Why start another one? 

“Hi, I’m Petra. And this is my fiance, Levi.” she told me, eyes sad as if I would actually care about how she felt over my mother’s death. It was my mother and it was my day to grieve, too. Not just all these people that would surely come up to me and say, “I’m sorry for your loss.” I don’t want their meaningless ‘sorry’s. They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t think they had suffered from a loss, too; it wasn’t just me. Everyone had a reason for being here and it was because they suffered from a loss. They didn’t need to tell me that they were sorry about mine. I may have lost a mother, but some people lost a sister, a friend, a wife, a daughter. Everyone here had a connection to my mother somehow. They needed to grieve on their own time, just like me. I wasn’t here to mingle; I was here to say goodbye to my mother. Forever.

‘"I’m Eren and this is my sister, Mikasa.” I told Petra and Levi, eyes darting back and forth from each of them, silently challenging them to question it. They didn’t. Petra actually looked a little scared, but I knew it wouldn’t last long when she remembered that she was an adult and I was nothing but a child whose mother had died. I knew that’s all I was to people. There really was no doubt about it. 

“Look, kid, no need to get angry. My fiance is your mother’s cousin three times removed. They hung out a little as kids and we came to say our respects. Didn’t mean to bother you. If you’re threatening her, though, I have no problem kicking your ass, even if we are at a funeral.” Levi whispered lowly in my ear, making me glare at his fiance and hold in the shiver that wanted to go down my spine. I gave him a tight nod, lips pressed together and stood up, walking over to my mom’s body lying in an open coffin. 

Have you ever seen a dead body on a TV show? Most people that watch that don’t realize what a dead body like that symbolizes. Sure, when it’s a stranger on a television show that everyone knows isn’t actually dead, death doesn’t seem like such a big deal to most people. Think about your mother dying. How would you feel? If your mother was abusive or bad, pretend for a moment she wasn’t. Pretend she was amazing, the most perfect mother you’ve ever met and she’s all yours. And then she dies. And you’re left with nothing but a stone with her name on it. To me, it feels like a part of me has been ripped away, like I’ve been stripped so that everyone can see my soul and my guilt. I’m completely exposed.

Seeing my mom made me realize that her body, her looks, that really had nothing to do with what my mother was. My mom was comforting words, bedtime stories, fighting for what I wanted and what Mikasa wanted, and supporting us in almost everything we did. My mom was her words and her actions. Her body was really just a figurative version of my mother so that people knew who she was, so they knew what she looked like. But did they really? 

I realize now that my mother wasn’t this body laying in the coffin, having people and cry and grieve and mourn around it. My mother was alive. Her spirit was alive. And that was all I could ever ask for. 

It wasn’t long after my new revelation that they shut the coffin and put her in a truck, everyone getting in their cars and following behind the truck that held what once was my mother. We followed it to the town’s graveyard, where there was a reserved place in the ground just for mom. I hadn’t seen my dad yet, but somehow I knew he was here, he was coming. He needed Mikasa and I for this as much as we needed him. At a moment like this, the family you do have is everything. When a loved one dies, you realize how precious everything you’ve ever took for granted is. And I was ready to make up for my mistake.

Since I live in a relatively small part of New York, maybe an hour away from the big city and the lights and the constant buildings no matter where you go, it didn’t take long to get to the graveyard, which was good for my family because we could walk over to visit my mom often, which I knew we would be. This graveyard and a meaningless piece of stone with her name on it would be the closest we could get to her for awhile. Sure, we’d never fully get used to not having my mother there, but we’d have to learn to live without her and learn to be able to get out of bed knowing that the person who made our whole household happy was gone. 

But we could be happy without her, without truly abandoning her. Right?

Everyone was in their seats in front of the hole and coffin which sat on the thing that lowered coffins into the ground when it came time. And then there was my dad. He was standing in front of the audience of people who came for my mother, including me and Mikasa, who sat on the first row of seats, looking sadly from him to the coffin. 

“It’s no secret that my wife died last week in a car crash. She’s dead. I know it’s going to be hard to accept this. It already is hard to accept this. I will have to live with the fact that I couldn’t protect my wife from death for the rest of my life. We gather here today to say goodbye to her. When we lower her into the ground, everyone will get their chance to throw some dirt onto the coffin and say goodbyes and farewells to her. Thank you all.” 

My dad looked calm as could be, despite not having had any interaction with a human in slightly over a week and having his wife die. His voice didn’t even crack and his eyes didn’t look glossy or tired. What had happened? Just last night I heard his sobs continue like they had all week, yet now he looked like he did everyday, except he was at his wife’s funeral. Did he feel any real remorse?

I felt bad for just thinking something like that. Of course my dad felt remorse. He loved my mom; everyone did. I realized that he was just putting on a brave face for the surrounding people. He was leading by example. If he seemed calm and controlled and he was the dead’s husband, then other people would follow by his example and control themselves from bursting out in tears and making the whole event even more sad. Sure, it was a funeral, but people have their whole lives to cry. Today we needed to say goodbye. Everyone knew that my mother would want us to be strong in her midst, dead or alive. 

Slowly but surely, everyone stood up as the grave workers did their work and lowered my mother’s coffin into the ground. We all watched, faces simply a mask to hide our sadness over the sadness radiating through each and everyone of our bodies in that brief moment in time where the coffin disappeared from our sight and into the hole that would consume my mother for the rest of eternity.

Once the workers had left, leaving us to our devices, my dad directed us to get into a line in the back part of the coffin, where there was a pile of dirt that would fill up the whole my mom was in. I was the first in line, staring at the pile of dirt, which, oddly, made me feel intimidated. Is it possible for a pile of dirt to make you feel intimidated? Well, I did. But I still hesitantly reached out and took a small handful of dirt and held it over the hole, looking sadly down at the coffin in the ground.   
“Mom, I love you. You were always there for me, no matter what I did or how I acted. You made me a better person, even if I never told you and I didn’t appreciate you enough. You made me myself and I like how you did. I promise to you that I will do my best to be a good person for you. I’ll think about you everyday. I love you. I miss you. Goodbye.” I told my mother, voice cracking at the end as the dirt fell out of my hand and onto the coffin. My head bowed down in a silent farewell and I walked a little ways away, listening to Mikasa as she spoke to their mother. 

“Mom, when I was eight, you adopted me from a horrid adoption center. I was treated horribly and they beat me, so I had bruises and the people that came to adopt never took me because they thought I was violent. Then you came. You saw in me what no one else ever could see: that people had broken me. You took me in and slowly put the pieces of myself back together. And I’ll love you for the rest of my life for it. You may not have given birth to me, but you were the best mother I could ever have. I love you. I miss you. Goodbye.” she told our mother, voice staying emotionless as she spoke so she could keep from crying again, even if it would be hidden by her funeral veil.

When she finished and walked away, I enveloped her in my arms, rubbing her back lightly. When we were little, she was taller than me and taunted me for it, but when I hit puberty, I passed her by about two inches, and you bet I taunted her day after day for it. But now, I let her hide her face in my chest and sniffle. I looked out over the graveyard and noticed a pair of eyes that I wouldn’t soon forget. They were Jean’s eyes, lighting up when the met mine. He motioned for me to come with him, undoubtedly to his apartment so that we could cuddle and he could make me feel a bit better over my mom’s death.

“Tell dad that I’ll be back around nine. I love you, Mikasa.” I whispered into her ear, giving her a tight squeeze before running off to meet Jean, not stopping until I got into his black Camaro, out of breath and panting. Jean and I had a lot of memories in this car, some that are way too inappropriate for anyone eighteen or younger. Yes, eighteen. That’s how R-rated it is. 

When we were finally both in the car, Jean looked sadly over to me, leaning over and pressing his forehead against mine, whispering softly, “I heard what you said to her and it was beautiful, Eren. I’m really sorry.”

I had no words. Just a tear that fell down my cheeks as I leaned forward and pressed my lips familiarly against Jean’s, us moving our lips together. It didn’t last long, maybe a few seconds, but I needed it. I will only cry in front of two people: Jean and Armin, my best friend, who couldn’t make it because he was visiting his family down in the south. So I curled up into a ball in the driver’s seat as Jean looked at me sadly and started driving to his apartment, the only place we could hang out and kiss and such other than his car. We could hang out at the bookstore, but we couldn’t be a couple at the bookstore. It sucked, but we did love each other. No Levi or anything could change that.

It was five in the afternoon, so I had about three and a half hours to spend time with Jean and mourn properly over my mother. Jean would comfort me, I know it.

Sure enough, when we got to his apartment, I went over to his small bed and laid down, curling up in a ball and making a slight purring noise whenever Jean wrapped his arms around me. Jean felt bad about the accident with my mom, though I knew he only felt bad because I was his boyfriend and my mom had died. If we weren’t dating and had never met, he wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about my mother’s death. He probably wouldn’t even know that she had died. And that made my heart hurt slightly. 

Jean was pretty much a jerk to anyone other than me, which sometimes worried me because I thought maybe he might turn on me and start beating me or something like people do in movies or really bad porn sometimes. He never had, though, in the two or three months we’ve been together. So that made me feel assured as I laid in his warm arms while he softly kissed my neck to make me relax. 

“It’ll be okay, Eren. I’ll keep you safe.”

Those words kept me reassured and sane long enough to make me fall asleep in Jean’s arms, even though I knew better than to fall asleep at Jean’s on a school night. 

-

I woke up at ten at night and freaked out when I saw Jean’s clock, scrambling out of his bed and calling to him, whether he was asleep or not, “Love you! Call you tomorrow!” I just got a groan in return, but I really couldn’t be bothered with it at the moment as I raced out the door and down the steps, all the way to my house. I had made it to my house in ten minutes flat and quietly creaked in, wincing every time I hit a squeaky floorboard. I tip-toed all the way to my room, satisfied when I saw my dad asleep in his bed from my place in the hallway. I walked into my room and took my shirt, shoes, and pants off, getting into my bed and curling up under the three blankets I had there. It’d been cold the past few nights and I wasn’t risking it again. 

“Goodnight, Mom.” I whispered to my ceiling and closed my eyes, once again falling into a dark oblivion.

**Author's Note:**

> Obama's mom.


End file.
